Increase in death registration in 2020 not entirely due to Covid fatalities: NITI Aayog member V K Paul

The increase in death registration in the 2020 calender year as compared to 2019 is not entirely due to Covid fatalities, NITI Aayog member V K Paul asserted on Tuesday and said “exorbitant” multiples of coronavirus deaths being published by some agencies with respect to India must stop.

As an example, Paul, who is also the COVID-19 Task Force chief, referred to a recent publication in the Lancet which claimed that Indias estimated cumulative Covid deaths between January 2020 and December 2021 was over eight times higher than reported.

The documented deaths due to Covid in India over that period was around 4,89,000, the Lancet had claimed in its paper entitled Estimating excess mortality due to the COVID-19 pandemic: a systematic analysis of COVID-19-related mortality, 2020-21. It had also claimed that Indias estimated cumulative excess deaths due to Covid between the period were the highest in the world at 4.07 million.

The government on Tuesday published the Civil Registration System (CRS) report 2020 based on birth and death reports.

In case of registered deaths, the number has gone up from 76.4 lakh in 2019 to 81.2 lakhs in 2020, an increase of 6.2 per cent, the RGIs report Vital Statistics of India based on the Civil Registration System for 2020 said.

“Now that actual count of excess deaths from all the causes are available, there is no rationale for using modelling-driven estimates based on pure conjectures and assumptions,” Paul told

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